EVE Online: Pay 2 Win

I know this isn’t the gameplay, or the tutorial that I promised I would do after the introduction but something hit me. There’s a lot that I left out from the introduction that didn’t fit into the introduction, but at the same time it didn’t fit into the tutorial parts either. Because of that I thought I would make this video before the tutorial just explaining these things and bringing light to questions that new players might have. I’m not going to talk about all the questions new players might have about spin palace free spins so if you intereted visit Casinoslots NZ.

I’m going to start off lightly and just answer a question I get asked a lot. It doesn’t really have a yes or no answer, but I’m going to give my answer anyways. The question is: Is the game fun to play? Now, personally I would say yes. The game is really fun to play, and that’s of course biased considering I have an insane amount of time in the game.

But I don’t play the game 24/7. I can play it for a few months and then take an equally long break from it unless something is really going on that keeps me coming back and entertains me more than other games could. The question is highly dependent though, it really comes down to what you do with your time in the game, because when I first started playing I did it alone and I went down the usual mining route. I did some manufacturing but I did that for like 1 or 2 years and looking back I can’t really remember why I kept coming back to the game, why I kept logging in. But I ended up getting involved with some corporations later on, or guilds if you will, and realized that I had personally, for those 2 years, played the game completely wrong.

Because I found out I really enjoyed the social part of the game. Having somebody to fly with or just talk to someone while doing the boring stuff. I found that a lot more fun than alt-tabbing to Netflix while sitting AFK in a belt just mining asteroids for hours.

Anyways, going a bit off-topic but in short: Yes, the game is fun. Just make sure you keep it interesting and make sure you don’t let the game grow stale and, you know, burn you out. So yeah, on to the bigger questions. Now this topic I feel is a big one to cover but I’ll do my best so here we go. Every time EVE has had a free-weekend on steam, or released a new trailer, or even made it onto the news due to large-scale conflicts. News websites.

I always read comments like this: And the answer to the question is simple I feel, like yes. Now is a good time to join, every moment is a good time to join in my opinion. And with the game being Free 2 Play the only thing you’ll lose by trying it is time, so you know, if you want to try it then that’s all you have to risk. However, it’s not really the question that interests me but instead the answers given or the debate it spawns. Back in April and May I had a steam review for EVE ‘blow up’, kind of. And during that time I met a lot of potential new players with the exact same question.

But when I answered that question with the same answer I gave here I would get replies of something along the lines of this: Maybe not quite as “hostile” but this was a comment on the review I made. And this is where this topic kinda falls down a rabbit hole, because yes, older players will have more skillpoints than you. Unless you dump a whole load of cash into your character.

And yes, this can give them an advantage over you. But that’s just like the black and white answer and I feel that there is sort of a grey zone to this, and it’s a grey zone because in EVE it’s about specializing into what you want to do. A player who has been part of the game for years will have millions of skillpoints spread over many skill categories but at the same time he might have the majority of his skills in categories that don’t interest you in the slightest. Take me for example, I have a ton of skillpoints in Industry which some of you might not even be interested in. I would then hope that those skillpoints don’t matter to you as it doesn’t really give me any advantage in, let’s say PVP, if that’s your interest. So you have new players who could focus into weapon- weapon skills, ship skills and so on.

And in a few months they would surpass me mostly because I have skills only within Industry. Therefore giving them an edge in PVP over me, even though I have played for years and they recently just started playing. Now this is just an example, of course, but hopefully you get the picture. And even if my skillpoints are placed in a category that interests you it only takes you a couple of months to get on the same skill-level as a veteran player in terms of like skillpoints. But the way I choose to look at it, look at EVE in this aspect, is that there will always be somebody who is better than you because there will always be people who have played longer than you and it’s better to, instead of letting it discourage you, just try and learn from them.

Because even if you have the same skillpoint level as them doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re better than them, or vice versa. So it’s all about knowledge when it comes to game mechanics and the game itself. It benefits you just as much or maybe even more than the skillpoints you have. So to keep this short try not to obsess over how many skillpoints older players have compared to new players or you and instead just try to learn the game as you train into what you want to do.

You’ll benefit more from it and hopefully you’ll enjoy the game a bit more. So the 2nd largest question, or statement depending on who you talk to that I have heard is that EVE Online is a Pay 2 Win kind of game. And like with the previous question I feel there is a bit more to it than that. The debate whether or not EVE is Pay 2 Win has been around for a long, long time. And the most recent outburst of this was earlier this year when skill-injectors were introduced, which I will talk a bit about later on.

So using this hastily made picture you can kinda make out the process for how PLEX works. PLEX is short for Pilot License Extension and allows you to stay subscribed to the game using your ingame cash-flow in case you’re not able to do so with real money. But it also allows people who are well-off in real life to buy PLEX via the store page and sell it on the market for whatever ISK value it goes for. This is where the claims for Pay 2 Win comes into Play and just as with the last question there is a black and white answer of: Yes, this does give people with a lot of disposable income an advantage over players who doesn’t have that. But even if that is correct, which I am inclined to believe it is because ‘on paper’ it is Pay 2 Win, I still don’t feel that it’s a problem with EVE. It’s again about the knowledge of game mechanics and the ships, and the gear that you use.

You won’t see anyone who PLEX their way to riches gain a super advantage over others, except for in the size of their wallets of course. Being rich and having access to all the fancy ships and equipment doesn’t mean that you are bound to win every fight and encounter you get into. As a matter of fact, the more expensive your ship and fitting is, the more likely people are to either gank you or hunt you down, so you could argue that it’s a disadvantage to fly fancy expensive ships.

And as I mentioned earlier there is a way for you to buy skillpoints. CCP implemented this earlier this year which allowed players to extract their skills and put them on the market for other people to buy. I have only bought skillpoints a couple of times so I don’t quite know how it works, but from what I have gathered it goes kinda like this: A player with a lot of skillpoints in what he sees as useless categories can buy a skill-extractor. He can use that extractor to extract half a million skillpoints. Then the extractor becomes a injector instead, which he can then use to inject into himself again to apply to skills that he thinks are more useful, or he can put it on the market for others to buy and consume. Depending on how many skillpoints you already have, you won’t get all of the 500.000 skillpoints in the injector, like me for example.

I only gain around 150.000 skillpoints from a injector. So the more skillpoints you have, the less you gain from the injectors. And with that said I can completely understand why people would still call it a Pay 2 Win game but you also have to remember that this game has had a character market where you could basically do the same thing.

You could buy a character with the skills that you wanted from another player who sold that character, so, in the end- I mean yes, it has the elements of a Pay 2 Win game but it doesn’t affect the game in the way you would imagine when you hear people mention Pay 2 Win. It’s not going to be a magical win-button for everything you do, real experience of the gameplay, of the ships and of the equipment that you use will be way more valuable than all the skills you can inject to yourself. So even if you’re thinking about buying skill injectors just to get like a new fancy ship it’s a lot smarter to instead train manually and learn how to fly the ship properly. I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy skill-injectors I’m just saying experience counts way more than skillpoints put into it.

So yeah that’s basically my opinion on this subject/question/statement. And lastly, before this video becomes too long is a question that I haven’t been asked too often but I think I could just answer it anyways. And that is: How often does the game receive content and how often is it balanced? The game receives frequent updates now where as it used to be that the updates were few and far between. The content that you get now is free of course, like it always has been so you won’t have to worry about paying for expansions or having content locked behind paywalls (Not counting the subscription benefits).

Other than that, the meta in the game takes time to change so it all comes down to what is being balanced and the length between balance updates. CCP (in my experience) likes to space the balancing in order for the players to get used to the balancing and in order for them to give enough feedback to CCP for them to either fix it or move on to something else to balance. And sometimes it might take them a bit too long between balancing, or they don’t balance at all which can leave part of the playerbase a bit agitated. Again though, it kinda depends.

The Developers are a lot more flexible now with the frequent updates, so it is definitely moving towards the better. You can’t really blame CCP either tho (For slow updates) as they want to have every ship be relevant in some kind of way, all thought that isn’t always the case. The game has 100s of modules and 100s of ships so I imagine balancing can be tricky especially when you tackle the current meta in the game. And that is the end of this video. I promise the next one will be me going through the tutorial and gameplay, but I felt I had to make this. As you can tell, non of these topics would have been too good to cover while doing the tutorial and they would simply take up too much time which could be used to explain other things in the game.

Anyways, thanks a lot for watching this. I hope this answered some of the questions / concerns you might have. If you have any other questions, again just leave a comment and I’ll get back to you on it. Until next time, Fly Safe!

o7 Until next time, Fly Safe! o7 Until next time, Fly Safe! o7 *Dramatic Music Intensifies*